Mind Over Market

Financial author Robert Stowe England tells the story of writing his new book, Black Box Casino , at the Mortgage Bankers Association 98th Annual Convention and Expo at the Hong Kong Room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago on October 10, 2011. The comments were followed by a book signing. The event was sponsored by Titan Lending, IDS, and Depth PR. The story of writing the book was also told the following day, October 11, at Barnes & Noble's DePaul Center Bookstore in downtown Chicago at DePaul University's Loop Campus. That event, too, was followed by a book signing. Read more about the book at this link:

"You can't understand the United States at all unless you understand what's going in Europe," Greenspan stated in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box October 7, 2011. "I think we have been through a remarkably elaborate program to try to find out whether the single currencies work," he said. Like others, Greenspan thought it would work in the beginning because the markets bought into the idea it would work. This could be seen in the pricing of the currencies in countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal as they moved toward currency union. As the date of currency union approached in each country, the spread in interest rates of local currencies above the German bund would narrow dramatically from a level of a hundreds of basis points. "I said and thought the markets are assuming that the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards and Portuguese are going to behave like Germans, and that's what [the markets] were telling us," ...

This YouTube video is a recording of a RTL-Z Dutch television program of October 7, 2008. The Dutch news program plays an audio recording of President Bush in a speech in 2002 when he calls for increasing lending flexibility for blacks and Hispanics so that poor people "can have a house as nice as anybody else." He set a goal of 5.5 million new homes for minorities by 2010 to close the "homeownership gap" between whites and minorities. This was to be achieved he said, through new initiatives from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make it easier for people with poor credit histories to qualify for a mortgage. President Clinton got the ball rolling and ramped up relaxed lending standards with a National Homeownership Strategy in 1995. As part of that, Fannie and Freddie introduced a raft of programs that made it easier for people with poor credit and little or no money down to obtain a mortgage.

Speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box, Bernie Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, blasts the regulations coming from the Dodd-Frank Act as "Bonnie and Clyde" because they are going to destroy small community banks. In the process, there will be no loans made to potential start-ups and the source of future jobs creation will be lost.

Harry Dent, founder and CEO of HS Dent, is author of a new book, The Great Crash Ahead. He sees an economic and market crash between 2012 to 2014. As baby boomers pay down a sizable chunk of $42 trillion in private debt in the United States to deleverage, this will be an ever growing deflationary force. Baby boomers around the world will start saving and stop driving up consumption. Because of this deleveraging, Dent warns that a debt crisis is coming back stronger than ever. Dent does not believe that efforts of central banks to inflate and provide stimulus to the economic to counteract this trend will fail. "In the United States, we keep taking viagra and nothing much happens." He predicts gold will crash after rising to $2,000. Silver has already peaked, Dent said. The U.S. dollar's role as the safe haven currency will be strengthened. That is because, as private debt is paid off, it makes dollars more scarce, and it restores value to the dollar, he explain...

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a key architect of a law passed in 1992 that set Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the road to ruin, according to a new book by Robert Stowe England to be released September 30 by Praeger. The book, Black Box Casino, uncovers the myriad factors that led to the financial crisis of 2008, the worst financial implosion of modern times. This story is one of many threads woven into the book's narrative. ACORN was a key leader in clandestine negotiations among housing activists to shape new legislation that would set into place the regulatory regime that governed Fannie and Freddie. According to an affordable housing advocate familiar with what transpired at the meetings, ACORN and other housing groups were "informally deputized" ( Black Box Casino , page 42) in 1992 to write key parts of new legislation by former House Banking Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat. ACORN was co-founde...

In this report from Australia's DatelineSBS, Adrian Brown reports that China is building 10 new cities a year and many of them, after completion, remain ghost cities with few or no inhabitants. The largest such ghost city is Zheng Zhou New District in Henan Province in north-central China. (The old Zeng Zhou is the capital and largest city of Henan.) This centrally-commanded economic activity is being done just to keep more people gainfully employed, according to Brown. However, it would appear to be building toward an ultimate crash and on a scale far larger than the U.S. housing bubble that created such havoc. There are an estimated 64 million empty new apartments in these new cities. The apartments are priced at $100,000 to $300,000, while Chinese median income is around $6,000. Thus, the vast majority of Chinese live in tiny one-room apartments -- or even shared apartments, often with shared communal sink and toilet. Buyers have to plop down half the price up fron...